4 Ways A PIM Will Save You Time
Managing all your product data is time-consuming. Just picture it…the SKUs spread out in multiple tabs on a spreadsheet, your inventory in constant flux in your ERP with new products in development in your PLM. Your life revolves around acronyms and data editions. Then, add multiple ecommerce marketplaces on top of it, and you have version upon version of product descriptions, photos and other data to manage, too.
Ecommerce is booming in a big way, and major changes are here to stay. There’s no time for clunky systems that slow you down, especially when it comes to getting your products available online with their data totally optimized.
Product Information Management (PIM) software exists to make you more efficient and effective with your product data. And when that translates to real minutes and hours (and weeks and months) saved, you’ll finally have space to feel excited about today’s changing consumer behavior in ecommerce instead of being crushed by it.
A PIM saves you time on two different levels: in your day-to-day, and in time to market. Now let’s dive into how that shakes out with the four biggest ways a PIM can save you time.
First, Let’s Properly Define PIM
PIM software has become the standard for multi-channel sales, and in today’s data-driven world, there are many reasons why. You can read more about the purpose and origin of PIM here.
In short, a Product Information Management (or PIM) system helps you manage all your product data through automatically organized and optimized data aggregation, not to mention better storage and one-click distribution across every channel.
The magic word here is “automatic.” Data management handled by spreadsheets and other outdated systems leads to mistakes and errors, not to mention the unending labor of revisions. And that takes far too much time, don’t you think?
There’s frustration involved, too. Lots of it.
Just like you want to save yourself time, you also want to avoid frustration. We get it. Fortunately, those two desires go together. As you dig into the four ways a PIM will save you time, we guarantee it will save you just as many headaches, too.
1. Your PIM Aggregates Information from Multiple Sources
Inventory data, multiple spreadsheets, and several departments within your business all play a role in product data. It’s a true symphony of parts, and without one hub (hehem, conductor) to manage it all, it’s like a symphony where the musicians are playing from different ends of a football field. There’s no way harmony will be reached.
This is the reality for any business managing product data manually. This practice will never be time efficient.
Your PIM saves an extraordinary amount of time by aggregating product data from every source with a simple importing option. You can immediately collect and assemble data from:
Spreadsheets
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (where you keep your inventory)
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems (where you design your products)
The PIM acts as the common ground to all these systems, while allowing each of them to retain the same product data in the formats they require. With PIM you’re finally able to coordinate between departments without a gazillion versions of product data and specs, improving your own and every other department’s productivity.
If you never had to pass product data to a coworker in a spreadsheet format again, how happy would that make you? Adopt a PIM as your data “glue” between departments, and you’ll find out just how happy you’ll be.
2. A PIM Sends All the Right Information to All the Right Places
Whether you’re on one ecommerce marketplace or on several, your PIM is the system that pushes all the right information out to all the right places. You can finally stop stashing that bottle of Excedrin at your desk, because your data headaches are over.
PIM software manages every bit of your product data, including:
1. Product attributes
2. Product photos and videos
3. Marketing data (meta descriptions and more)
4. And technical data
3. With PIM, Your Time-to-Market is Changed Forever
Getting your product data ready for any marketplace takes time. Let’s look at Amazon as an example (since it’s the world’s most popular online shopping site, anyway).
If you’re not selling on Amazon or aren’t sure what marketplace to select, read our article on how to choose the right ecommerce marketplaces.
For every product you have, in order to sell it on Amazon, you have to prepare the product data to fit into the ecommerce giant’s product data guidelines, namely:
You must have a product identifier
Titles have to fit within the character maximum
Descriptions have to fit within the character maximum, too
No product information can be time-sensitive
And we’ve only scratched the surface. Just think, if you have a big product portfolio, this becomes an enormous undertaking.
Your PIM saves you time by managing versions of optimized product data for you. There’s no more manually entering information when you’re ready to upload products to Amazon—your PIM prepares the perfect upload file in the exact data template each marketplace requires.
4. Save Time You Would Have Spent Suffering
The fourth way a PIM can save you time is much harder to calculate. It comes down to the moments you spend stressed out. They’re those minutes lost when work consumes you in your downtime. Every hour of your life that you spend thinking about how to overcome the impossible—when all that does is exhaust you more—accumulates into the biggest time suck of all.
You can calculate the ROI of an ad campaign or that new squeeze page on your website. But you can’t put a number on how much time feeling stressed ultimately consumes.
You do know, however, that it consumes a lot.
Fishing through a dozen spreadsheets to find the product data you need, only then to wonder if that data’s up-to-date, is not what you need. Your PIM enables you to ditch over-complicated and antiquated systems for a smarter, simpler way to manage all your product data. Making everyone’s lives easier will not only help your whole business save time, it will also have a positive mark on retention, productivity, and collaboration.
The Moral of the Story
Stop wasting time! Right now, you can schedule a demo for the PIM designed to be as simple as simple can be. Having better control over time management also allows you to make better business decisions, including keeping your eye out for new business trends to get ahead of the next one. You can develop greater control by managing your product data with the right digital tool. Learn more about our PIM and reach out to us today!
Alex Borzo
Writer at Amber Engine
A brand can only communicate with messaging behind it, and that's where Alex Borzo comes in. A digital content marketer with a decade of experience, Alex's expertise shines in the research and writing she does for dozens of clients. When she connected with Amber Engine, it was a natural fit—AE had ambitious plans to provide their audience with even more valuable content to win in ecommerce, and Alex's background working with SaaS innovators positioned her to jump right in. The result? Brands and distributors are now discovering AE and all the best tactics to get to Amazon and other online marketplaces in weeks instead of months.